I’m sitting my next one on Friday as well.

Good luck to you too.

I’m just hoping that this week’s isn’t so hard!

Good luck!

Thanks for your comments. I’m sure my teacher reads our dictations faster as well! Perhaps it’s an unwritten teacher thing. You’re right, it does work. All her recorded dictations are apparently 10 words faster than they should be as well.

RE age: the main thing I find is getting into learning again. I’m just about there but I have two weeks left! Anyone who is doing it straight out of uni is so used to learning and sitting exams.

I never had finals, I just had coursework and it was all subjective, never really factual. I’m not that academic so this course has been a struggle. Something to think about if you are going to embark on the fast track.

I did the NCTJ fast-track course two years ago and was by far the oldest student on it. I mention that because, right on the very first day, the lecturers all warned me that one fixed rule seemed to be that the older you are, the harder you found it to pick up shorthand.

It was true: I was always the dunce of the shorthand class, struggling every inch of the way. Right up to the final week I was convinced I was going to fail even the slowest speed (40 wpm), but on the day – miracle of miracles! – I passed at 50. Over half the class passed at 100. It turned out that our cunning and excellent shorthand teacher (hats off to Derick Richards) had been deliberately dictating to us at 10% faster than he had claimed, so the exam had been like one of his easier classes.

So it is doable, but for me it was definitely a mountain. I probably need another such intense class to ever hope to reach 100 wpm but, if our class was anything to go by, most people do reach a fairly high speed in 20 weeks. It just takes a lot of effort. A hell of a lot.